Monday, September 23, 2013

A Lesson Plan for Raising Up Compliant, Non-Thinking Citizens

Note: The below commentary by John Whitehead points to the dangers of the new Common Core curriculum that is being advanced by government. It is extremely dangerous. The government should get out of the education business completely. It should be left to the private sector. Ron Paul's new book, The School Revolution: A New Answer for Our Broken Education System,, for example, offers alternatives to the current government education system.-RW

By John Whitehead

“A fool with a tool is still a fool.  A fool with a powerful tool is a dangerous fool.”—Michael Fullan, international school reform authority, on the powerful “tool” that is Common Core

As I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there are several methods for controlling a population. You can intimidate the citizenry into obedience through force, relying on military strength and weaponry such as SWAT team raids, militarized police, and a vast array of lethal and nonlethal weapons. You can manipulate them into marching in lockstep with your dictates through the use of propaganda and carefully timed fear tactics about threats to their safety, whether through the phantom menace of terrorist attacks or shooting sprees by solitary gunmen.  Or you can indoctrinate them into compliance from an early age through the schools, discouraging them from thinking for themselves while rewarding them for regurgitating whatever the government, through its so-called educational standards, dictates they should be taught.

Those who founded America believed that an educated citizenry knowledgeable about their rights was the surest means of preserving freedom. If so, then the inverse should also hold true: that the surest way for a government to maintain its power and keep the citizenry in line is by rendering them ignorant of their rights and unable to think for themselves.

When viewed in light of the government’s ongoing attempts to amass power at great cost to Americans—in terms of free speech rights, privacy, due process, etc.—the debate over Common Core State Standards, which would transform and nationalize school curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade, becomes that much more critical.

Essentially, these standards, which were developed through a partnership between big government and corporations, in the absence of any real input from parents or educators with practical, hands-on classroom experience, and are being rolled out in 45 states and the District of Columbia, will create a generation of test-takers capable of little else, molded and shaped by the federal government and its corporate allies into what it considers to be ideal citizens.

Moreover, as Valerie Strauss reports for theWashington Post: “The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core’s ‘college and career ready’ performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.”

With so much money to be made and so many questionable agendas at work, it is little wonder, then, that attempts are being made to squelch any and all opposition to these standards. For example, at a recent public forum to discuss the implementation of these standards in Baltimore County public schools, one parent, 46-year-old Robert Small, found himself “pulled out of the meeting, arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer” simply for daring to voice his discontent with the standards during a Q&A session with the superintendent.

Even calling this event a forum is disingenuous, given that attendees were not allowed to stand and ask questions. Instead, attendees were instructed to write their questions on a piece of paper, which the superintendent would then read and members of a panel would answer. In other words, there would be no time or room for debate, just a one-sided discussion. And this is what life in our so-called republic of the United States has been reduced to, a one-sided monologue by government officials who neither care about what “we the people” have to say, nor are they inclined to hear us out, just so long as we pay their taxes and abide by their laws.

“Don’t stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle,” shouted Robert Small to his fellow attendees as he was being dragged out of the “forum” on the Common Core standards. “Is this America?”
No, Mr. Small, this is no longer America. This is, instead, fascism with a smile, sold to us by our so-called representatives, calculating corporations, and an educational system that is marching in lockstep with the government’s agenda.

In this way, we are being conditioned to be slaves without knowing it. That way, we are easier to control. “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude,” writes Aldous Huxley. “To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”

The purpose of a pre-university education in early America was not to prepare young people to be doctors or lawyers but, as Thomas Jefferson believed, to make citizens knowledgeable about “their rights, interests, and duties as men and citizens.” As Jefferson observed, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Yet that’s where the problem arises for us today. Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights, largely due to an educational system that does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Many studies confirm this. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29% of respondents couldn’t name the current vice president of the United States. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why America fought the Cold War. More critically, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6% couldn’t even circle Independence Day (the Fourth of July) on a calendar.

A survey of American adults by the American Civic Literacy Program resulted in some equally disheartening findings. Seventy-one percent failed the test. Moreover, having a college education does very little to increase civic knowledge, as demonstrated by the abysmal 32% pass rate of people holding not just a bachelor’s degree but some sort of graduate-level degree.

That Americans are constitutionally illiterate is not a mere oversight on the part of government educators. And things will only get worse under Common Core, which as the Washington Post reports, is a not-so-subtle attempt “to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum.” One principal, a former proponent who is now leading the charge against Common Core, quickly realized that Common Core was not about educational reform as President Obama would have us believe. Rather, it’s about pushing a curriculum wrapped around incessant pre-testing, testing and test prep that teaches students how to take tests but not how to think, analyze or learn.

As with most “bright ideas” coming out of the federal government, once you follow the money trail, it all makes sense. And those who stand to profit are the companies creating both the tests that will drive the school curriculum, as well as the preparatory test materials, the computer and software industries, and the states, which will receive federal funds in exchange for their cooperation.
Putting aside the profit-driven motives of the corporations and the power-driven motives of the government, there is also an inherent arrogance in the implementation of these Common Core standards that speaks to the government’s view that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school, and should have little to no say in what their kids are taught and how they are treated by school officials. This is evident in the transformation of the schools into quasi-prisons, complete with metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, and surveillance cameras. Equally arrogant are school zero tolerance policies that punish serious offenders of a school weapons policy the same as a child who draws a picture of a gun, no matter what the parents or students have to say about the matter. The result is a generation of young people browbeaten into believing that they have no true rights, while government authorities have total power and can violate constitutional rights whenever they see fit.

Yet as Richard Dreyfuss, Oscar-winning actor and civics education activist, warns: “Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids’ lifetimes, and we will be a fable. You have to find the time and creativity to teach it in schools, and if you don’t, you will lose it. You will lose it to the darkness, and what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty. If it lasts for more than our lifetime, for more than our kids’ lifetime, it is only because we put some effort into teaching what it is, the ideas of America: the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly.”

John Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization.

11 comments:

  1. constitutionally illiterate? This coming from people who think that states can nullify federal law. hilarious.

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    1. You aure are a product of government education. LOL! Moron.

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    2. The problem with arguing with idiots is they pull you down to their level then beat you with experience

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  2. When the country was formed were the school houses private entities?

    I'm not so sure privatizing and profiting from education is the panacea...just another way for crony capitalists to issue another invoice.

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    1. Jerry, of course states can nullify federal law, they do it all the the time california and colorado on dope for example.

      anon @12:58 what public school houses in 1776? and thats what vouchers are all about.

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  3. Jerry,

    Regrettably you are an example of the constitutionally and historically illiterate product or our educational system. Had you been better informed about history for example, you would know about the Alien and Sedition Acts under Adams and the response of Jefferson and Madison. Jefferson and Madison, principle authors of the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution respectively were outraged by these unconstitutional acts signed by Adams. They authored the Resolutions of '98, passed by two state houses, which said that a state within its borders could overturn acts of Congress they deemed unconstitutional. Their overturning would stand unless a majority of states voted to nullify their overturning.

    The states having created the Federal government and granting it limited powers, never gave up the right to take back those powers if abused. That is the concept at the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. The colonies claimed the right to secede from England and gave as an explanation a list in the document of many abuses. Nowhere subsequently did the states ever explicitly give up the right to secede. They retain it to this day.

    The New England states were threatening to secede at the time of Jefferson's election. Jefferson in his inaugural address acknowledged their right to secede and said they should be free to do so unmolested.

    Read some history before you reveal yourself to be historical nincompoop again.

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    1. Thanks, Anon-

      JWolf is so ignorant that he doesn't deserve such a reply, but thank you for setting him straight.

      "Better to remain silent and be thought ignorant than open your mouth and remove all doubt"

      Fitz

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    2. It is doubtful that I set the intellectual pigmy brain named Jerry straight. Pigmy brains are usually intellectual cowards as well. So, it's doubtful that he is brave enough to even read my response.

      The real problems with our society will never be solved trying to convince twits like Jerry. Jerry's intellectual vomit provided me an opportunity to address others on this site that might be sporting more brain power. Looks like I was successful.

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  4. There is a problem with asking people historical questions like 'why did the US government fight the cold war'. Now if I wanted to give the correct answer most people expect, it would be to contain the spread of communism because that's what the US government told people. But what people are told by the government and what the real reason for anything is are usually two different things. The cold war was fought primarily to fund military projects and wars and conduct foreign policy that made insiders a lot of money at taxpayer expense while frightening the population into submission with the threat of nuclear attack and/or communist take over.

    Depending on who's asking one of those answers could be wrong. And that's where we are already. The correct answer is always what the government teaches in the school over what really is the truth. If americans are really coming out the school system blank that means it will be much easier to teach them the truth. For decades americans come out of the schools filled with falsehoods they believe to be true. Waking up as it is commonly called has to be something that happened on an individual's own time, on his own effort, where his own interest forced him to face the truth that he had been lied to for years. Most people when confronted with the truth believe what their grade school teachers told them instead. If now, people are blank, that means they can be taught the truth without first overcoming the falsehoods of K-12 schools.

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  5. It's hard to see because we are living through it but the old ideas of information monopoly are coming to an end. Our lives may be lived surrounded by those in love with statism but in the long view of history we are at the tail end of an age. An age that will bring new understanding and appreciation for the NAP to the masses.
    Peace.

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  6. I know this doesn't solve the issue, exactly, but the arguments in favour of homeschooling are piling up almost daily. This will mean that my son will be educated to think for himself, but he will be one of a cohort of millions that don't share that skill. I don't know if I am dooming him to a life of exclusion or providing the priceless gift of a free-thinking education. It depends on the day, I suppose.
    Regardless, I suspect that the challenges denoted in the above article are by now too far gone to save, in an overarching sense. The days when there were still cheap, fast solutions on the list of options are long gone. What are left are the expensive, unpleasant, long-lead-time fixes that unfold over generations and require patience and vision, things that are rather lacking these days.
    I recommend the film The Postman for perspective. I love this movie because it is a movie about ideas, specifically the ideas that are America, and that those ideas are worth a great deal to preserve. Suggesting a movie might be a tad trite, but the message is the point, not the means by which it is communicated.

    God Bless America.

    Mike in Canada

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